How Cloudflare Workers Achieve 0ms Cold Starts

Hello! In this video we are taking a quick look into cold starts and how Cloudflare manage to get rid of this problem. I hope you enjoy it!
Useful Links:
How CloudFlare works: developers.cloudflare.com/wor...
Blog: mikhail.io/serverless/coldsta...
Music:
• YKWIM
Huge thank you to Harris Heller for providing copyright-free music.
Hey everyone! My name is Redhwan Nacef (Red for short). In this channel, I'm hoping to share my thoughts on software engineering, coding, management, and all things tech. I hope you enjoy!

[@h4ckedneko]

When a worker (isolate) spins up it is actually not 0ms but in the range of 0.1 to 9ms depending on your worker and the server hardware it runs on. The true reason how they achieve 0ms is because your worker spins up during TLS handshake, instead of when HTTP request was received. The handshake will take some time and by the time it finishes, your worker is already started making it 0ms cold start.

[@mikebradbury3997]

Hi Red, just found your channel (via the Pulumi video). Thanks for making this content, i'm learning lots! Curious as to what desk mat you have?

[@RedhwanNacef]

Welcome! Glad you're enjoying some of the content :) It's the "TECKNET Extended Gaming Mouse Pad XXL", you can find it on amazon. Great value for the price.

[@BrutalTurtle]

Nice one Red!

[@RedhwanNacef]

Thanks!

[@xiaohu8149]

Hi Red, this one is good. Now I know which one to choose. Many thanks. By the way, is there any special settings to use isolate, or at the fundamental design Cloudflare has done all for us?

[@RedhwanNacef]

Thanks. This is just the design that Cloudflare (and other providers) has, so no extra steps on your end.

[@gabrielrezende9102]

Thank you

[@manmaaze]

This was COOL

[@RedhwanNacef]

Thanks

[@Tech_Advisor_to_CXOs]

Does Cloudflare spin up a new isolate for every request?

[@RedhwanNacef]

Good question, although most of the time a new Isolate is created I don't think that is guaranteed. I think it is possible for an Isolate to be reused.

[@Tech_Advisor_to_CXOs]

@@RedhwanNacef Thanks, the reason I asked is that this creates a problem of state from the previous invocation leaking through, creating more cognitive overhead for the engineer to take care. If isolates are so fast to create, perhaps Cloudflare should create a new one every time to simplify developers' lives.

[@RedhwanNacef]

@@Tech_Advisor_to_CXOs I'm not sure of the specifics, but this sounds like something like the Cloudflare team would have figured out! I think from the engineer side its safe to make the assumption that every request is stateless, hopefully meaning no overhead.

[@Tech_Advisor_to_CXOs]

@@RedhwanNacef This contradicts your earlier message - if the isolate is reused, engineers have to be careful that state in global variables doesn't leak.